Sony A handful of RX1 photographs

oliveview

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This is a continuation from my thread regarding my first trip with the RX1.
 

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Thanks. In some cases, where I feel the natural colors don't improve, or even detract from the shot, I'll create that look as an option to straight B&W or duotone.
As with everything about the images from the RX1, there is SO much leeway with tweaking the colors and dynamic range. Just an amazing photographic tool.
 
i really enjoyed these, and i think many, especially the second one, really show off the richness and depth of the files. i enjoy mine immensely, and love just looking through my results over and over. ive never done that before with another camera--well maybe with the x100 for awhile. of course i'd be even more in love if it had a useable distance scale, useable auto iso, reasonable battery life, and maybe a dedicated SS knob. ): but i couldnt be more imoressed with the images.
 
Thanks.
The RX1 has been an interesting but very enjoyable new direction for my photography. Besides the massive differences in actually using it, compared with my usual DSLR, the post-process has been quite eye-opening. I came home with several thousand photos to sort through, and wound up fully post-processing almost half - which is an amazing keeper percentage. But I had to learn new techniques in LR, as the usual tweaks, settings and such from my previous cameras just don't apply to the little Sony. In fact, by the time I finished processing the last photo, I wanted to go back and re-work a huge number of the earlier ones, because I had learned so many subtle things about how to coax every last bit of sharpness, color and dynamic range as I worked my way through.

Those two airplane photos were right into the blinding morning sun. I was able to salvage every bit of detail out of the sky and hazy mountains, and purposely left the blacks quite dark. But there was still so much detail in those shadows, that I could have turned the images into HDRI shots from just the single exposures. Just amazing.

For the first time in years, I plan on investing in some nice large prints.
 
would love your tips for pulling every last drop of info in PP w lightroom.

I'll never claim to be an actual LightRoom expert (far from it, in fact). But in regards to getting nice images (to my eyes) from the RX1, I found a number of key things in almost all the shots:

1) I have no idea whether it's the way LR decodes the Sony RAW files, or simply the way the Sony sensor sees things. But the reds blow out FAST. Also, the blues tend to get mighty feisty, too. But nothing like the reds. So, in almost every shot where I had bright red in the frame, I found that I invariably needed to go into the individual color channels, and drop down the red saturation by a good 25-35 points.

2) I found that the images could stand up to some serious sharpening, without falling apart. However, the additional threshold settings need to be fine-tuned for each shot, to make sure that flat areas don't become noisy, or that soft blurs don't get fuzzy.

3) I found that the auto white balance does a very good job in most situations. However, and I'm extremely touchy about this, I feel that it has a tendency to push skin tones ever so slightly too green for my tastes. But final color balance and tone mapping is an extremely personal, and subjective thing. So, some people are fine with a certain color cast. But quite often, I found myself yet again going into the orange and yellow channels to almost imperceptibly push those channels into slightly warmer temps.

4) I found that I needed to keep an extremely light touch on the "clarity", "vibrancy" and "saturation" settings. For some reason, the RX1 images seem to react very strongly to those settings. With some subjects, that was not only fine, but really helpful. Reflective subjects (like the take-out window) or those with already strong contrast features could handle very heavy doses of those settings. However, delicate images, or especially those of known faces, just didn't like that at all. Either too many unsightly details are exposed, or you get extremely tone "halos" around various shapes.

5) I shot with every in-camera correction turned OFF. So, that meant I needed to lean on LR at times when things like chromatic aberration showed up. Amazingly, that was never all that bad. Nothing as horrific as I would get with my Nikkor 50 1.4 (good grief!!!). But when it did show up, just the tiniest correction was all I needed with the with the magenta or the cyan slider. Literally, just a unit or two. That was it. I could perfectly kill off the color glow of thin branches over bleached out sky. I could knock down the shimmering glow off of fine water ripples. I didn't, however, see any advantage in using the general "chromatic aberration" click box. Like I said, I needed to use the manual fine-tuning.

So, that's it in a rambling nut shell. Obviously, there are tones of other things I do to each and every image I capture. But what I described, above, seemed like very core settings I needed to pay attention to, in order to have a good starting point for the look I like.
 
Thanks for the tips, oliveview. In addition to lowering saturation for blown-out reds, you could try lowering luminance. I've also found my RX1 files can take -- and even need -- a large amount of sharpening, if by sharpening you mean capture sharpening in LR or Camera Raw. I'd be interested in some of your usual settings if you are able to generalize. And I agree that clarity requires a very light touch, although with the latest iteration of LR/ACR, I'm not sure that's unique to the RX1 files. Finally, if you are shooting raw, I think the only correction that is applied is lens shading, even if all of the corrections are turned on in camera. (I have all of mine turned on so they are applied to any jpegs I may shoot.) I do have chromatic aberration correction set to auto in ACR, though, and it seems to do a good job.
 
Thanks for the tips, oliveview. In addition to lowering saturation for blown-out reds, you could try lowering luminance. I've also found my RX1 files can take -- and even need -- a large amount of sharpening, if by sharpening you mean capture sharpening in LR or Camera Raw. I'd be interested in some of your usual settings if you are able to generalize. And I agree that clarity requires a very light touch, although with the latest iteration of LR/ACR, I'm not sure that's unique to the RX1 files. Finally, if you are shooting raw, I think the only correction that is applied is lens shading, even if all of the corrections are turned on in camera. (I have all of mine turned on so they are applied to any jpegs I may shoot.) I do have chromatic aberration correction set to auto in ACR, though, and it seems to do a good job.

I tend to stay away from ever touching the individual color channel luminance, as I most often find that quickly introduces obvious banding in most of my images. But I may give that a quick look with some of the RX1 files to see whether it might be a secondary option. Thanks.
Yes. I'm simply adding overall image sharpening in LR. The key, as I've found, is to always tailor the subordinate settings per each image. In other words, I normally crank the sharpness up to 50, 65 or even 75 units. But then I need to dial back the other options, which somewhat counteracts the original sharpness setting. It really is a per-image thing. Obviously, overall changes in contrast, clarity, etc, can also influence the perceived sharpness.

I especially made sure that my lens shading correction was turned "off" the moment I got the camera. I had read a couple articles about the possibility that was baking slight hue shifts into the edges of the RAW files. As it is, and I have yet to figure out the cause, but a number of my shots have had unusually strong color vignetting. It's odd, because it hasn't happened all the time, and even potential variables like extreme differences in outside ambient temp have varied. I've only noticed it in certain extreme outside shots, where there is a great amount of clear blue sky, and flat ground detail. I've triple-checked to make sure that correction is, indeed, set to off in the camera.
Again, it's been isolated enough that I'm hardly worried.
 
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